


the mad search for emergency exits, soft places

by palmviolet



Category: Alien Series, Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Genre: F/F, Mild Sexual Content, characters angsting about humanity and their place in the universe, post-Alien Resurrection, we love a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22215181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmviolet/pseuds/palmviolet
Summary: earth is greener than when she left it. maybe if it had been this green then, she wouldn’t have gone at all. trees have sprung up from cracked rocks and sand and creeks bubble and splash where before men died of thirst. it’s beautiful, in a way, if that’s what you like.“it’s beautiful,” says call, that first day in the hospital when she stares out at the horizon, presented like a wrapped gift through floor-to-ceiling windows. “like in the pictures.”“huh,” ripley says. she’s never really considered earth in the lens of ‘pictures’, of textbooks for children raised on mars, of data stored in androids’ heads. “i guess it is.”// call and ripley, after it all.
Relationships: Annalee Call/Ellen Ripley
Comments: 15
Kudos: 60





	the mad search for emergency exits, soft places

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: all i know about the universe is what happens in alien one through four. i haven't looked at any of the background etc etc it's all my invention.
> 
> title is from the poem 'I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What is My Life Span? Open Closed Open' by Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfield, 2000

The rain here isn’t human rain. 

Sure, it’s wet. It drips down from roof tiles and gutters and the arches of spaceports like it did two hundred and fifty (and something) years ago, but it’s not human rain. Or rather, it’s too human. It’s human and nothing else. Man-made rain, a phrase she thought she’d never say.

“An experiment in terra-forming,” her guide tells her, that first exhausted day. The Nevada sun glares in through the windows and makes her squint against the light, alien to her after three lifetimes of darkened fluorescents. “Of all the places on earth, we found Nevada to be the most compatible with Mars. That or the Sahara, and Nevada’s closer to our space program anyway.”

Terra-forming on Mars began only five years later, after the brilliant success they’d made of Vegas. _What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas_ \- or at least, it had in her day. Now it gets transplanted to Mars. 

Earth is greener than when she left it. Maybe if it had been this green then, she wouldn’t have gone at all. Trees have sprung up from cracked rocks and sand and creeks bubble and splash where before men died of thirst. It’s beautiful, in a way, if that’s what you like.

“It’s beautiful,” says Call, that first day in the hospital when she stares out at the horizon, presented like a wrapped gift through floor-to-ceiling windows. “Like in the pictures.”

“Huh,” Ripley says. She’s never really considered Earth in the lens of ‘pictures’, of textbooks for children raised on Mars, of data stored in androids’ heads. “I guess it is.” She leans over and inspects the wound in Call’s side with clinical, serious eyes. It’s healing up nicely – if ‘healing’ is the right word. She’s still amazed they’d kept the technology. She’d have thought they’d have destroyed it all the moment the androids had done something they didn’t like. That’s what humans do, she knows. They destroy what they don’t like and they preserve what could kill them. 

Ripley’s always been pragmatic. The alien in her even more so.

Two weeks before, their ship lands abruptly, a bumpy finish, because Ripley’s definitely rusty and Vriess and Johner have no experience at all. They land her and immediately they’re faced with a dozen guns, soldiers, officials, each of them less scary than what they’ve all just faced. Johner laughs in their faces as they try to compound the ship but Vriess holds him back as Ripley steps forth. 

“We’re no threat to you,” she says, hands up, like that’s not a brazen lie. Like she couldn’t snap them each in half. “We come bearing important information, crucial to the survival of the human race.”

It turns out the people who picked them up aren’t soldiers at all - or, at least, are soldiers-for-hire. They belong to a corporation. A news corporation, not like Weyland-Yutani. Trading in information, not energy or aliens. Ripley sells them her story without a shred of guilt, and when the government comes knocking she just shrugs. “Too late,” she says. “And you can’t call me a whistleblower without acknowledging your own involvement, which right now is nothing more than libel. Is that right?” She cocks her head with her newly found sly smile, which she’s found tends to get people to do what she wants. They’re leaving, disappointed, when she calls out - “Oh, and I need medical assistance. Not for me, for my friend.”

When they discover Call’s an android the situation sours even further, but Ripley quite frankly doesn’t give a shit about what’s happened between androids and humanity in the last two hundred years, and what the alien queen-mother wants, she gets. (They don’t quite know that part, but it gives her some horrified satisfaction to refer to herself as such.) “You want me to play nice?” she says, as Call’s seizing on the gurney between them, something horrible having gone wrong inside her when ~~her child~~ the alien hooked a claw in. “Help her, and I’ll be all the poster-girl you want.”

Her face is calm, but her insides are churning. Johner is normal, _human_ , and an asshole besides, so him understanding? Out of the question. Vriess, maybe, he might understand. But he and Johner are strangely close now and he too shares that male, macho attitude, the one that recoiled when Call bled white instead of red. But Call–

Call’s the only one she’s got left. The only one who’s possibly even more divorced from humanity than she is. Ripley doesn’t much like the idea of standing up in front of the nations, smiling and pretending to be earth’s saviour. She doesn’t much like profiting off the deaths of her crew, the marines, the prisoners on Fiorina 161, the scientists and soldiers and pirates on the _Auriga._ She doesn’t much like calling down the wrath of God on what are, now, effectively, her children. Her brothers, her sisters, her ancestors. She’s inextricably wound up in all this and she doesn’t like it.

But she’ll do it, because one day the media will move on and then she can rest. She can rest as the acid boils and bubbles in her veins, and she can rest safe in the knowledge she won’t create any more of the awful things. When she dies, she’s decided, she’ll have Call cast her body into a furnace for real this time. No blood samples, no lingering DNA. She’ll wipe herself off the face of the earth, if that’s what it takes. And it will.

Before then Call and her will take a house in the middle of a forest. They’ll watch the sunset and stand together in the rain when everyone else ducks for shelter, and they won’t visit the awful parts of earth where there are no more trees and the rain that falls is acidic like Ripley’s blood. Ripley won’t care all that much what happens to Vriess and Johner, but Call will. It’s a strange, gorgeous quality of hers, caring. Ripley doesn’t envy her.

“What are you thinking about?”

She turns and looks at Call, sitting up in her hospital bed, a vague, real smile playing on her lips. Her hair’s growing - she didn’t know android hair could grow. “How great it’s gonna be when we can finally get you the fuck out of here.”

“Oh yeah?” Call shifts on her pillows. Ripley doesn’t really understand why she needs so many pillows, or why she’s in a human hospital in the first place, or why this is all taking quite so long, but then again maybe she was wrong in her earlier assumption. Earth doesn’t know how to deal with androids, not anymore. Knowledge that went up in smoke with the last android colony.

“Yeah. I wanna show you a forest. A real forest, not this fake shit they’ve grown in a lab and transplanted into Vegas sand. Northern California, that’s the place. Redwood trees so wide you can drive a car through their trunks.” Her voice has become vague, her eyes sliding shut with the memory. So vivid she almost feels like herself again. So vivid she can forget it’s only passed down through the far-reaching DNA of an alien queen.

“Sounds amazing.” When she opens her eyes, Call’s still smiling. “Thank you.”

“For what?” Ripley’s tone is measured.

“For making them save me. I know- I know they wouldn’t have let me live, not unless someone intervened. And I know they wouldn’t listen to Vriess and Johner wouldn’t even try, so it had to be you.”

“Did it?” she returns, voice quiet, reflexive. “I guess it did. I was just saving my own skin, though, kid.” Call isn’t a kid; she doesn’t know why she said that. For all she knows Call is as old as she is. “Package deal, I guess.”

Call is undeterred. “Sure.” _Package deal._ “Well, thank you, anyway.”

Ripley looks at her. Her huge, dark, real-but-not-real eyes. Her dark hair growing faintly shaggy around her face. Her slender hands twitching over the hospital blanket – not a malfunction, not this time, but a purely human emotion. Nervousness, even. 

Sometimes she thinks the synthetic is more human than she is.

When she’s not in Call’s hospital room, Ripley spends her days wandering the compound. She meets young cadets who tip their hats at her and hurriedly duck their heads, retreating as fast as their legs will carry them. It’s a strange feeling, she thinks, to be back on an earth that doesn’t know her. The real her. The rural hick who got herself pregnant and then joined up to see the stars because she just wasn’t _ready_. She despises herself for it now, of course. Thinks of Newt and her chest tightens like _She’s_ still in there, only She’s not. Funny how Ripley made a better mother to an aberration of nature than to the two little girls who were actually in her charge.

One day she does what she must, and she hops on a domestic passenger ship going east. Disembarks in Nebraska and surveys the old, empty plains, completely alone under a clouded, pregnant sky. It hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed and somehow that makes it all worse. Because she’s changed, and now it’s her that doesn’t belong. Nebraska is Nebraska and she’s got acid for blood.

Her old house is gone. She’s glad of that, at least. She’s not sure she could take it if she were to wander the empty hallway, curl up in the too-narrow bed that used to be hers. In the dusty patch of earth that used to be her backyard, however, there is something – something that’s new, and old at the same time. (She’s experienced that a lot lately.) A narrow, fragile gravestone. Amanda’s name on it in a pristine little engraving.

She stares at it for a long, long time. She wants to cry, though no tears come. She wants to lay flowers on it, too, but she has none and she’s surrounded by empty grassland. She’d like to magic some out of thin air, but even the power of the alien queen has its limits.

She settles for sliding her knife (concealed, always concealed: weapons are banned within the compound) out of her boot and tracing a fine line across her palm. Not hard, but hard enough that she bleeds. Her blood - thick, gelatinous now, though still red - drips onto the dirt before the gravestone and carves a ragged path down through it. It’s some kind of memory, at least. The only memory her daughter will have.

She kicks dirt over the hole as she leaves, so the opportunists of some new Weyland-Yutani don’t extract her blood and breed more twisted monsters. (And she means herself, when she says this. The aliens were always perfect. That was the problem.)

On the ship heading back west some guy tries to talk to her – well meaning, she’s sure, but she doesn’t want to talk to him. She ignores him until he grabs her by the arm and her fist collides with his face so hard that later they have to put him on life support – and they want to arrest her, at first, but then someone else says “Hey, isn’t that Lieutenant Ripley? The one who saved Earth from the aliens?” and strangely everyone seems to back off.

She finds herself back in Call’s room, although she’s deathly tired and she has a perfectly decent bed waiting for her. Call’s sitting by the wall of glass looking out at the faint drizzle, a wire extending from the top of her smooth, pale stomach, visible through the open buttons of her shirt. Ripley follows it with her eyes and finds it plugged into a fuel cell, newly installed beside the bed. 

“Hey,” Call says as she comes in, with that new, open smile she’s started wearing, and Ripley’s still not quite sure how she should respond.

“Hey,” she settles for, and her voice is rougher than it should be. She can’t seem to tear her eyes away from the cable, its white sinuous length. Like an umbilical cord, and aren’t they all just machines at the end of the day?

“What’s wrong,” Call says, and her tone has gone flat. 

Ripley doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like the dryness of her eyes, the way the lump in her throat remains just that - a lump. She wants to cry – god, she wants to cry. ‘Emotional autism’, those moronic scientists on the _Auriga_ had called it, but she once knew an autistic kid and he wasn’t anything like this. He was kind of heart, and while Ripley’s never really been kind at least before she was sure she had a heart. Now she thinks the alien might have replaced it, when She grew between her ribs. Might have sucked away all its vitality, stolen it for Her own murderous growth. And now Ripley’s walking around with a hole in her chest where her feelings should be.

“I don’t know,” she settles on, stepping closer. She’s not sure where she expects this to go. Maybe she thinks Call will make a joke, let her settle back into their comfortable-if-surface companionship. Maybe she expects her to probe further, wheedle out of her the truth about Nebraska and Amanda and blood dissolving between the stones.

What she doesn’t expect is Call standing up, yanking the cord from between her ribs, dropping it with a faint _clang_. She doesn’t expect the smaller woman to march up to her until they’re less than a foot apart, pupils blown, cheeks hot and flushed with anger. “It’s this, isn’t it?” She indicates the cable now lying discarded behind her on the floor. “It’s proof. A reminder that I’m- that I’m _less_ than you, somehow. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what’s wrong. That I’m not human.”

Ripley considers her for a moment. “Yeah. That’s it.” Her hand comes up, fits perfectly over the slope of Call’s elegant neck. Her thumb strokes over the android’s cheek. “That’s it.”

She kisses her.

When it comes down to it, an android’s lips are no less soft than a human’s, no less warm. Call sighs against her, wraps her arms around her neck as if to leverage herself closer. Without a second thought Ripley’s other hand slips into her already open shirt, cupping her breast as she shivers under the touch. She’s eager, too, her tongue nudging into Ripley’s mouth, her fingers tangling in her hair.

Once, a long time ago in another life, someone told Ripley that androids couldn’t experience any of the following: hope, love, attraction, arousal. Fear, sure; anger and happiness at a push; those were all the allowances they were given.

Two hundred years later and she discovers the truth is very different – or, at least, things have changed since she went away. 

Call all but mewls as her kisses trace lower, as her hand finds the zip of the android’s pants. A tantalizing brush of her fingers, then Ripley withdraws. Guides them over to the bed and all but tosses Call onto it, pale skin still hot with that artificial blush, shirt spread wide and revealing. She aches to continue but first she checks the door, pulls the shutter over the window, clicks the automatic lock into place. Call is watching her every move, that sharp mind whirring behind those huge eyes. Ripley can see it working, even now, wondering why this is happening and what’s going to happen after.

That’s the thing with synthetics. The nip of Ripley’s teeth on her neck will translate as a simple line of code – and sure, we all have to process things somehow, but it means she won’t ever shut off. Will keep on thinking, calculating, processing. It’s impossible to stop.

That doesn’t mean Ripley’s not gonna try. 

A wordless moan, followed by a long, quiet, “oh, shit,” is all Call gasps when Ripley’s brought her over the edge with the deft combination of fingers and tongue. The android’s hand is trembling in her hair and she smirks against her thigh before coming up to kiss her again. Call is pliant, still eager, soft to the touch. She wants to reciprocate - Ripley can tell that much - but not today. Today she feels warm enough just lying by Call’s side.

“Call,” she says, sometime later, as she lies facing Call’s dark hair. She’s not even sure if she’s awake. (She doesn’t have to ask herself the question of whether androids sleep. She knows they do. She’s sat by Call’s bedside enough times.) “Call,” she says again, testing it out on her tongue, experimenting with the way the sound tastes.

“What?” Call is definitely smiling, though her voice is sleepy.

“Is it just Call? Call something? Something Call?”

She shifts against her, turns so she’s looking back into Ripley’s eyes. “It’s just Call. Call 8.3227. I mean, I had to give a first name to sign onto the _Betty_ , so I guess it’s Annalee Call.”

“Annalee?”

She feels Call shrug. “When I escaped the recall, I stowed away on a ship called the _Annalee_. It got me out, saved me. It felt appropriate.”

She likes that idea. Of choosing your own name. Honoring that which helped you along the way. But the _Annalee_ didn’t get Call out, didn’t save her. Call did.

Besides, it’s a human name. Call isn’t human anymore than Ripley is – Ripley Eight. ‘Ellen’ is a distant memory, no longer applicable. Ellen is gone. And it’s just as well, because Ellen would be disgusted by all this. Wires and fuel cells and milk for blood. Ellen would look at Call and think Ash, and Call is no more like Ash than an angel to an alien.

“You okay?” Call asks, voice soft. Her hand traces faint patterns on Ripley’s thigh.

“Just thinking,” she replies, pressing her forehead into Call’s hair. Nothing ever felt more real. 

Outside the man-made rain starts to pour.

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think! i might write another chapter, depending.


End file.
